The Politics of Immigration

Contradictions of the Liberal State

James Hampshire

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745671413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política de inmigración

Immigration is one of the most contested issues on the political agenda of liberal states across Europe and North America. While these states can be open and inclusive to newcomers, they are also often restrictive and exclusionary. The Politics of Immigration examines the sources of these apparently contradictory stances, locating answers in the nature of the liberal state itself. The book shows how four defining facets of the liberal state - representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism, and nationhood - generate conflicting imperatives for immigration policymaking, which in turn gives rise to paradoxical, even contradictory, policies. The first few chapters of the book outline this framework, setting out the various actors, institutions and ideas associated with each facet. Subsequent chapters consider its implications for different elements of the immigration policy field, including policies towards economic and humanitarian immigration, as well as citizenship and integration. Throughout, the argument is illustrated with data and examples from the major immigrant-receiving countries of Europe and North America. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in migration studies, politics and international relations, and all those interested in understanding why immigration remains one of the most controversial and intractable policy issues in the Western world.

CHAPTER ONE

Immigration and the Liberal State

For anyone who pays the slightest attention to politics in the liberal democratic world it won't come as a surprise to hear that immigration is controversial. What was once viewed as a technocratic policy problem has morphed into one of the most contested issues on the public agenda. In Europe, loud and contradictory claims are made for and against immigration: according to some, immigrants are rejuvenators of ageing populations, motors of economic growth, and saviours of the European welfare state; to others they are to blame for native unemployment, wage depression and welfare costs, not to mention social and cultural disintegration. The debate is barely less polarized in North America and Oceania, despite their longer historical experience of large-scale immigration and their self-identification as nations of immigrants. In the United States, the largest destination country in the world, attempts to pass much needed immigration reform have foundered amid heated congressional debates and public protests. And even such measures as have been agreed, such as the construction of a 600-mile fence along the southern border with Mexico, are deeply controversial. It is clear that, across the rich liberal democracies, immigration is an issue freighted with a lot of political baggage.

About the only thing that is not in dispute is that immigration is ever more significant and complex. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there were approximately 214 million international migrants in the world in 2010. This represented an increase of almost 40 million during the first decade of the twenty-first century and a doubling since 1980. While the rate of migration flows slowed in 2007–8 as the economic crisis took hold, migrant stocks have not been significantly reduced, and preliminary data for 2011 suggest a return to greater flows (OECD 2012a: 3). While international migration is now a global phenomenon, affecting Southern as well as Northern regions, the majority of international migrants, 57 per cent, live in high-income countries. Europe is home to some 72.6 million migrants, North America (Canada and the USA) accounts for 50 million, while Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, plus several small islands of Polynesia and Micronesia) accounts for 6 million (IOM 2010). As mentioned above, the United States remains the top migrant destination in the world, with a migrant stock of 42.8 million, and four European Union countries (Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Spain) appear in the top ten, as does Canada.

These numbers tell only a fraction of the story, however, as international migration is not only increasing in scale but also becoming more variegated and complex. Today, people migrate to and from an ever wider range of countries, for diverse reasons, with diverse implications for both sending and receiving states. The catch-all term ‘international migrant’ encompasses inter alia high-flying executives transferring between the offices of multinational companies, students travelling abroad to study at universities and colleges, seasonal workers recruited to pick crops, husbands, wives and children joining overseas relatives, people fleeing persecution and seeking asylum, undocumented migrants looking for a better life, and so on. Migration patterns have also changed, becoming more fluid and circular compared with traditional patterns of long-term immigrant settlement. For receiving countries, the scale and complexity of international mobility means that immigration is one of the most difficult policy issues to address, as well as one of the most politically charged.

This book provides an analysis of the politics of immigration in the rich liberal democracies, primarily the countries of Europe, North America and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand). It is therefore necessarily wide-ranging and cannot do justice to the complexities of individual countries. But, by taking a panoramic view, it aims to provide a comparative introduction to this thorny topic and, at the same time, advance an argument about immigration and the liberal state. The point of departure for this argument is the claim that the state ‘matters’ when it comes to understanding immigration – indeed, that immigration cannot be understood without probing into the complexities and contradictions of modern liberal statehood. From this starting point, the book aims to show that the contested nature of immigration has its roots in the institutions of the liberal state, an understanding of which is essential to explain why effective and coherent immigration policies are so elusive. Contrary to claims often heard in popular debate, the intractable nature of immigration policy is not a failure of governance but rather a reflection of contradictory imperatives of the liberal state. This, at least, is the claim I seek to justify throughout the rest of the book.

The claim that the state matters for understanding immigration is on one level virtually tautological because the state system is constitutive of international migration, and therefore of immigration and emigration. On another level, states matter because they seek to intervene in and influence migration flows using a range of policy instruments. Although migration may be driven by economic, demographic and environmental factors, the actions of states affect migration in myriad ways, including the decision to migrate in the first place, where to migrate, how to migrate, what routes to follow and, later, the trajectories of integration. Hence this book heeds the now familiar (but still sometimes inadequately realized) injunction to ‘bring the state back in’ to migration research (Hollifield 2007). Bringing the state back in requires more than the insertion of an abstract and monolithic entity – ‘the state’ – into existing migration debates. Rather, we must unpack and deconstruct the actors and institutions that constitute the state. When we do so, we discover that different actors and institutions have conflicting agendas on migration and are, to varying degrees, able to mobilize support behind these agendas. Policies reflect these conflicts.

When contemporary liberal states meet the fact of immigration, four constitutive features of liberal statehood shape their response: representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism and nationhood. As will be seen, each of these features is an abstraction or shorthand that captures a distinct constellation of actors, institutions and ideas which combine to produce dynamics of openness and closure across immigration, citizenship and integration policymaking. While this approach implies certain commonalities in the politics of immigration across liberal states, it is important to stress that it does not preclude cross-national variation between them. On the contrary, it provides a way to make sense of similarities and differences in the patterns of political contestation that shape policy outcomes.

At the same time, the book does argue that there are common patterns of conflict arising from these generic features of liberal statehood. Representative democracy, constitutionalism, capitalism and nationhood each generate distinct imperatives for government action on immigration. And none of these imperatives can be ignored because each is rooted in the legitimation of the liberal state. To put it very simply, mobilization through majoritarian democratic institutions, often based on claims about the protection of national identity and values, generates pressure for more restrictive immigration and integration policies; whereas employer demand for migrant labour and appeals to universal rights both generate pressure for more open, inclusive policies. Thus the governments of liberal states are pulled in different directions because core activities that they are expected to undertake to secure their legitimacy generate contradictory imperatives for immigration policy.

International Migration and the Modern State

If migration is as old as human history, international migration is a product of the modern world order and its defining political institution, the nation-state. As Aristide Zolberg has written, ‘it is the political organization of world space into mutually exclusive sovereignties that delineates the specificity of international migration’ (Zolberg 1994). The modern state is at once a territorial and a membership unit. It is partly defined by its claim to sovereignty over a specific expanse of physical territory, within which it claims the exclusive right to make laws backed up with what Max Weber famously described as a ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ (Weber 1991 [1919]: 78). One of the key aspects of sovereignty is the right to decide who is allowed to enter that territory. At the same time, states are also membership institutions, comprised of a demos or people who share a common identity as citizens (or, in earlier times, as subjects) and who enjoy certain rights and obligations as a result of this status. Today, citizenship is typically acquired at birth according to place or parentage or some combination of the two, and one of the core rights of citizenship is a right to reside in the state of which one is a member.

It is the combination of these two aspects of modern statehood – the carving up of physical space into sovereign jurisdictions combined with the ascription of politico-legal identities to persons depending on their place of birth and/or parentage – that structures the two sides of the international migration coin. Immigration consists of persons without membership of state a entering and residing within the territory of a; emigration occurs when a person with membership of state a leaves its territory to reside in the territory of state b, c, d, and so on.¹ Therefore, without the dual territorial and membership aspects of modern statehood neither immigration nor emigration would exist. To see the significance of this, imagine a world without defined state territories or membership statuses. In such a world, moving from the city of Lahore (Pakistan) to London (UK) would in principle be like moving from Leicester to London (both in the UK). The latter journey would be quicker and cheaper, but absent state boundaries neither would require a visa application, a valid passport, entry checks, and so on. And that is just the journey itself. In reality the status of being a legal immigrant, as opposed to a citizen, affects a person's access to rights (see chapter 6). But, in our fictional example, the impact on rights for the migrant from Lahore to London would have no more significance than today's migrant from Leicester to London. Moreover, in our fictional world there would be no such thing as an ‘illegal’ immigrant, just as today there is no such thing as illegal-citizens-of-Leicester-residing-in-London. That this world is so far-fetched only goes to show just how fundamental territoriality and citizenship are to the contemporary world order.

This simple thought experiment also points to the depth of the challenges that international migration poses to the modern state system. For many of the state's day-to-day operations, as well as its bases of legitimacy, rest on an assumption that most people will spend their lives in the territory of the state of which they are a citizen. Voting systems, tax regimes and welfare systems all have what might be called a sedentary bias, insofar as they are ill-suited to cope with mass migratory movements. Though the majority of humanity (approximately 97 per cent) do live within their country of origin, the 3 per cent who are international migrants have increasingly led states to adapt their practices to accommodate immigrants (and also emigrants, though this is beyond the scope of this book). Practically, immigration requires states to adapt to the presence of newcomers in their political systems, societies and economies. Normatively, immigration raises profound questions about how to legitimate state power, not least since in liberal democracies the coercive power of the state is legitimated principally through the election of governments, but in almost all such countries the right to vote in national elections is based on citizenship, not residence.

Four Facets of the Liberal State

Thus international migration is at once a product of the modern state and a challenge to many of its underlying assumptions. While true, this observation does not begin to explain the complex processes that shape immigration policies in the contemporary world. To do this, we must move beyond the assertion that ‘the state matters’ and seek to identify and unpack the constituent parts of liberal states that are most relevant for understanding immigration policy. While liberal states undoubtedly vary in terms of their histories, economies, cultures, and so on, they nevertheless share certain features which enable their common labelling and moreover create similar political and policymaking dynamics in the field of immigration. This book argues that four facets of contemporary liberal statehood are crucial to understanding the politics of immigration: representative democracy, constitutionalism, nationhood and capitalism. These facets combine to generate often conflicting demands for immigration policies. They are introduced briefly here before being considered in more detail in chapters 2 and 3.

The liberal state as a democratic state

One of the defining characteristics of contemporary liberal states is their democratic character. All of the immigrant-receiving countries discussed in this book are representative democracies, which is to say that their citizens elect political representatives through multi-party elections. Numerous different electoral systems, party systems and forms of government (e.g., presidential or parliamentary) are compatible with this broad definition, all of which are relevant to understanding exactly how representative politics influences immigration policymaking in any specific case. But even at this level of generality it is possible to spell out some of the implications that the institutions of representative democracy have for understanding how immigration is governed in liberal states.

First, in representative democracies, public opinion matters. What the voters of a given country think about immigration influences the kinds of policies candidates for office will propose, as well as the tone of discourse and atmosphere in which immigration is debated. Though political parties do not simply ape public opinion – since they try to shape it to some extent as well – they certainly cannot ignore it. This is true of most issues but especially so of sensitive and salient ones, which immigration has certainly become in recent years. In less politicized or technocratic policy areas, public opinion is less important. But when an issue such as immigration rises on the public agenda, becoming a matter of regular media coverage and popular debate, the importance of public opinion increases. Elected politicians cannot afford to be seen as ‘out of touch’ with public opinion on these issues.

Yet publics rarely think with one mind, especially on issues as controversial as immigration. Therefore it matters which parts of the public are able to get their voices heard and organize themselves to influence government. In representative democracies the chief mechanism for linking the government and public is political parties. It is parties that compete for electoral support from voters, parties that form governments, and governments which make immigration policies. Thus the ideologies and policy platforms of political parties, and how these are shaped through electoral competition, require consideration. In addition to political parties, any plausible account of immigration politics in democratic countries must include the myriad interest groups, ranging from employers’ organizations to human rights groups, who seek to influence individual policies as well as the wider political agenda.

Finally, any understanding of democratic politics today requires consideration of the role of political communication. The mass media – television, newspapers, radio and, increasingly, the internet – act as a forum in which the political agenda is set and policy issues are framed. The media do not form a neutral channel through which pre-formed opinions are communicated back and forth between politicians and voters. Even when not explicitly partisan, the media have their own values, styles and formats, which affect how and indeed what issues are presented. An important power of the mass media, if one that is hard to measure, lies in their ability to politicize certain issues while depoliticizing others, and to frame them in ways that make some positions appear more legitimate or feasible than others. This is especially relevant for debates about immigration, which are often characterized by uncertainty about the actual impacts of migration flows and are therefore particularly susceptible to claims and counter-claims that are not easily verified or refuted. Moreover, certain ‘impacts’ are on intangibles such as national identity and culture, where it is difficult to identify objective evidence to support or refute different positions.

In summary, it is through the cut and thrust of democratic politics that public perceptions of immigration are shaped, party strategies forged and government policies made. Thus immigration policies cannot plausibly be understood as functional outcomes of economic or demographic facts; they are rather the products of sometimes intense political conflict in which numerous interested parties attempt to shape the agenda and influence public perceptions. To say that ‘politics matters’ (Bale 2008) for immigration policymaking means that public attitudes towards immigration and immigrants matter, how those attitudes are or are not mobilized matters, and how immigration is depicted in and through the mass media matters.

The liberal state as a constitutional state

A constitutional state is a ‘state of laws’ or Rechtsstaat, in which the authority of government is derived from and limited by law. A constitutional state has at least three distinctive features (Rawls 2007: 85). First, a constitution defines the institutional architecture of the system of government. As the word suggests, this constitutes government by setting out the roles and powers of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary and defining the limits of those powers. These rules are usually written down in a single document o...